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Journal of Jack A. Lormere.
Day 5: I’ve been on the trail of these rumoured creatures and I’ve discovered something shocking. The link between these lands and Jackal have grown strong enough to cross both ways. Strange rocks now cover the land after these “Rifts” are closed and they allow me to transfer a part of myself to their home lands, Jackal. I don’t think my knowledge and skill crosses to Jackal, but upon returning I feel like I’ve retained what I’ve learned…
Jackal: The Next Frontier
For years now, the aggressive residents of Jackal have been relentlessly attacking the lands of Wurm through the use of Rifts – transporting themselves to Wurm and attempting to wreak havoc upon the citizens there. Now it’s the players’ turn, as Jackal becomes a land that players can travel to.
Following the close of the first Rifts after the next update, items known as Lodestones will appear at the site of the Rift and become craftable by players. These Lodestones will allow you to transport your soul to Jackal to take the fight back to them. Lodestone travel will be two-way, and will only transport your soul – no items or skills – but travel back to the lands of Wurm will impart some knowledge onto your character that you gained while on Jackal.
The Jackal server will be a server that resets every 6 months, with faster skillgain and action speed to account for this, meaning a fresh start for players wanting to experience it without the feeling of everyone being ahead.
These lands are not as tailored for human living as the normal Wurm lands, and this will be evident as you make your way there and explore. Work together and fight your way through the denizens of Jackal and take control of the land.
This is only the beginning of what the lands of Jackal entail, more details about this hostile and alien landscape will be unveiled over the coming days.
The post Jackal: The Next Frontier appeared first on Wurm Online.

remove templars and tower guards, removes all challenge from the game when people just walk champion rift digs to their 10s/m deeds and it gets dunked, or use tower guards to tank while they grind combat skills on it
increase starting skills to 10-15 or so, so you dont sit there failing to make kindling
multiple spawn towns so everyones not all clumped together

I've played quite a few MMORPG's in the past, and the general rule of thumb for all of them was "Don't log in on patch day". From what I've seen during my time with Wurm that isn't the case. Sure, there have been/are some issues, but from my perspective they've been addressed and handle with much better efficiency than any of the other, larger games, and with far less openness. Just my opinion, but it seems to me that griping about it here, or attempting to rake any of the dev team over the coals about it shows a distinct lack of grace. It would be much better to offer productive assistance than scathing condemnation.
Thanks for the updates, Keenan, and for all your hard work making sure Wurm is a fun place for us to play.

OKAY... I was letting my concerns out last night in GL freedom about some competitive gameplay that will only reward a few players... and here we are. As if the current unique mess is not enough, we will have a once in a 6 month period 'large point opportunity" for those who will manage to get in at their convenience.
Sorry, but this seems (another) bad game design.

Naturally with any launch there's going to be a period of tweaking and adjustment, both of what we are aiming for and player expectations, but we're glad that the feeling is we're on the right track, we'll keep working towards it.
The start of this is always going to feel like a grind, but we do have ideas for future iterations of Jackal to address that (our inhouse idea list is already about 4 pages long of bullet points)
We'll be improving rift material resource collection to address the lodestone issue too, being able to travel back to freedom means more willingness to spend time on jackal pushing out, so it's a win win for both sides.
We'll also be looking at adding more ingame information about whats going on, such as the purpose of the beacons, messages about Jackal points and so on.
There's a lot to work through and we'll keep working on making it as fun as possible, I love seeing everyone working together and coordinating in teams, it's pretty awesome.

This is just good old gatekeeping, and the very flawed premise of your entire post. There can be tons of different reasons why and how someone plays WO (all of which you're tacitly trying to invalidate), that's the beauty of it being a game that goes well beyond the strict definitions of a sandbox game. Jackal will likely give a massive incentive for even the few players to come together and cooperate in communities, something that PvE has for the longest time not given in any way. The "higher creative basis" you speak of is basically everyone being able to do everything for themselves. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but there are two sides to that coin, and an environment that lets us flip it for once is very intruiging. If not for you, then for plenty of other people.
You're also basing this all on the jarring misinformation that characters gain no progress whatsoever, which was, even among the scattered and sometimes vague information, clearly not the case from the very first post describing Jack's travel to Jackal and back. Could have saved yourself a wall of nonsense if you actually read, no offense.

Wanna bet?
I also think you're vastly overestimating just how weak you will be within a week of gameplay, even if you have 90 skills
girls can hold swords too (unless you're a boy then boys can hold swords too)

Flubb, its a small settlement of two players that are close to each others and I found this place I liked like three weeks ago and didn't take up on it. Infact I wasn't an experience player back then, just started. While learning new things and get a hang of it, that is why I decided to stick with Haven to see what kinda people are there and how friendly, but didn't turn out good as I though it would.
Anyway this cozy place I found, really suit an elf, that is connected to the big lake, having a little Elven Bungalow under a lot of trees and good overlook into the lake. I am happy there, made a deed and now going to take time for me setup the place. I named it Shady Hollow

I can paste some drain data from my app later, but on celebration i average 4.5s a month. I can go back years and show the difference between now and the nerf as well. Contrary to the socialist on the forum, 10% goes back to the trader and the other 90% goes to my upkeep. I dont profit anymore, havent for nearly 4 years. Guess what, that means you foragers are taking the coins i put back in the kingdom pool. Are you putting all of it into upkeep? How many rares have you bought?
Players also love to camp the sell-to-token feature as well as use free alts to conjure coins through foraging. Both these take coins from the kingdom coffers, which is where traders get money from. If there are no coins in the coffers when selling to a token, traders will be getting very little money.
I can confirm we get far less from traders because of this, but Trader draining was never intended for income. I'll take what I can get as long as I can get it, no use complaining considering sit does no good. #missingmyfountainpacks
I despise socialism and to suggest something is not fair because others capitalize on something before you is absurd. I have no issue telling yall I drain traders, at one point I had four of them. I stopped buying them when roi became nearly a year. At this current time I control one, and am content with the upkeep assistance it provides.
Have a great and hypocritical day nay sayers.

These are the View i have so far Still have to go climb the mountain that have some more land behind but its a work in progress but i also plan on chopping the trees down that are in the way for the island i see.

Simple suggestion; allow players to lead a unicorn if they've put a bridle on it without having to retame it. Keep it unhitchable or unrideable unless tamed for balance. This would make life far easier for those that are breeding unicorns without having to retame the male or female every time.
The mechanic is already there to put a bridle on, let us use it :)

Well was doing a monthly animal cull around my deed and found this shiny little chest no where near a starter town and better late than never.
Cheers Retrograde the champagne will look good on the dining room table.

Rifts have nothing to do with the global cast issues. Please keep that out here.
The 100 rifts goal is not even hard. As a relative newbie, I went to my first rift no earlier than Feb-19, and my recent rift goal count for Destination Unknown is 45/100. While it is unlikely that I accomplish that goal this year, it won't take much of 2020 to do it. I consider it ways easier than e.g. the 500 recipes, and much less work than the 25 veins. Every goal, though, can be done if you put enough effort into it.
The criticism of the global spell goal is not that it is hard. The criticism is that it is so aleatoric, for some possibly exclusive forever, no matter which effort they put into it. The criticism is further that the goal is divisive, turning groups of players against one another, encourageing antisocial and assholy attitudes, rewarding psychopaths and psychopathic behaviour.
In my opinion, the devs need to address that criticism. They may judge about the complaints against other goals as they think it is right. In my opinion they should ignore them and work on something more significant.

While EPIC is relatively the same as FREEDOM cluster.. it's just a pvp cluster.. and CHAOS is just a random piece of land.. with it's own creatures.. and 'friends with blunt & sharp things coming to greet you(one or another way)', well.. JACKAL's home world.. is a whole new place to explore... dev team could do wonders there.. and I'm not sure if anybody realizes what all that means...
It's like a test server(OK OK OK.. it's not a test server, BUT..) you have new land, new events, new start, possibility for the devs to get wild and try new things... WILD ideas that were so far a NO-NO option for the core cluster, and not exactly reasonable to implement on epic or chaos either. At least for me.. the potential to get crazy with new ideas there is endless...

The fullscreen game window will now open on the same monitor as the launcher was on.
Keybind settings have been changed to show keys in system’s keyboard locale
Mac: The native launcher has been built for compatibility with OS X 10.8+.
Note: those affected will need to redownload the application from our main page
Mac: Fixed blurry display on Retina screens

I agree with some of faty's points 1. starter deed is to fancy 2 templars and guards really shouldnt be the cure to beasts 3. chain beacons yes but do not restrict their radius to 50 but make them require a nearby beacon in range equivalent ofa ql 90 beacon(how ever long that range will be)
Something else id like to see is that we keep jackal hard we have to travel back to safety to leave jackal lands
What i imagine jackal to look like as it stands right now within 2-3 months is a road system or a cave system towards the stronghold area with an array of towers and beacons along the way and walls everywhere with all guards inside those walls on the roads with random deeds along the way with their own roads branching off from said main road leading all the way back to spawn deed
What i hope jackal will be in round 2 a few months in is something like this
Players are making outposts that are nothing more then a small walled in area/cave connecting up to a small road(bigger rift creatures get rid of walls when they come across them and not just random bash like a troll does) with tents for respawning while a small collection of people are making gear while a bunch of fighters are trying to hold off a wave of monsters that are spawning from a jackal beacon that the group is trying to destroy while deep inside of corrupted land
Where instead of having a straight road towards the stronghold you got small roads leading everywhere towards jackal beacons with every beacon requiring quite a bit of effort to destroy where death becomes an accepted thing but people still try to avoid it where loss of gear is accepted
What i hope jackal round 2 will be like at the start is people being more organized less random of a mess groups being focused on what they want to do(something we could not do due to lack of info) where before the round even starts people start to plan and work out and assign tasks to people who join said groups so that when launch day lands everyone can start from the get go and get started with a mindset of getting specific things up and running and less freedom/chaos style living and playing
It might be me but jackal has the potential to be similar to poe's league's sure its not for everyone(and thus normal wurm) but there will be quite a few people who will enjoy the new challenge the new start the more ways to refine things but quirks just need to be sorted out like the following(next to stuff i mentioned before)
1. pelts should not be made easy to get(eg no buying from traders) but pelt bearing animals should be abundant enough for the expected amount of players
2. Deeds requiring a guard tower and beacon within 10 tiles in order to place a deed(stops the massive land hogging with dozens of deeds full of templars leading to everything being dead and no animals spawning around starting deed and thus people complaining)
3. We dont need random events where "oh we are in corrupted and suddenly you loose health" as we all know how wurm is and it will be "oh suddenly you die as you set foot into a corrupted piece of land for 1 second" we need things like what is on chaos where normal skills suffer while enemies are around and instead of fighting skills working better you just dont get a buff
4. A more evened out terrain that isnt loads upon loads of 30-60 spike pieces of land around spawn i get you wanted to encourage weta travel but for those who dont have a rope its a pain
5. Skills should be at most 10 if not remain at 1 this is supposed to be hard sure its grindy sure some people wont like it but i myself i got to 50 mining 40 woodcutting 30 masonry 30 digging 20 carp 20 blacksmithing 30 leatherworking and 3 priests up to 40 faith and 20 channeling and a bunch more in 6 days time while working as part of a big group and me mostly being focused on hollowing out a cave
I would much rather start at 1 skill again and again and again every 6 months and have skill transfer back to freedom at the end of it then start at 50 skill because "oh no the grind is so bad boho after 3-4 days i cant stand it" becoming the reason we dont get skill transfer
6. crop rate increased for the first 2 weeks to be growth time of 2 days to allow a lack of food or cotton or wemp not to be a death sentence in a harsh setup
7.Less water, like seriously why do we have to have spawn deed be on a hilly shitty terrain surrounded by water it just encourages people to make row boats and ###### about not being able to use it throw us in a valley surrounded by mountains on every side but 1 leading into a giant forest full of corrupted land and horrors
8, rift creature waves: these waves would start out as a few rift beasts the first week or so slowly going up to 10-20 roaming together leading into more rift creatures joining with a new wave every few hours(random to a min max of 2-8 apart) rewarding every person who partakes a few jackal points and some rift mats(solves your lodestone problem) from humanoid rift creature "captain" type( warmaster and such)
9. enable newbie buff of food and water loss for the first 24 hours of gameplay but not the others
10. tone down damage that rift creatures do to armor at low ql(2.5-5 damage per hit of a rift beast to ql 25 is insane vs 0.08 of non rift creatures)
11. corrupted land should not look like a dense forest but empty plains with occasional trees and with the odd rift mat tree/rock/crystal around(with a cap of 20 of each type spread out around a rift beacon) 12. most important: have a clear list of every feature and its stat and all of its info everything written down in a properly written out post with no holding back or "lets keep this mysterious"
13. Spawn tools should be there in the sense of tents some ql 10-20 armor and a weapon and shield but no tools itself
I know i reply a bit often to this topic but when jackal is something that i wish wurm should have had years ago except even harsher then what we have now and i see people complain about "its to difficult" in the first 2 weeks and wanting to give up already and pushing for changes to ruin the experience and make it easy i cant help but not be quiet
You cant load a boat into a ship transporter? go mine for 8 hours across 2-3 days do some woodcutting for 2 hours you will have the body strength
You are afraid you cant get back to freedom to take care of your deeds over there? Dont roam to far away without a means of getting back(infrastructure transportation what ever)
Cant find a resource you need? barter and trade
Animals to hard? ask around in local or freedom chat form teams work together dont rush things so quickly
Think the grind is to hard? Go back to freedom the grind is easy really easy Word of advice discard how you think wurm works dont rely on "oh i want my skills here as this is what im used to having" We are people on an expedition to a new land and for some reason(come up with a good lore related one retro) our experience and skills did not transfer over but our knowledge of how to get those skills did(player knowledge of the game)
Yes i am passionate about this as this might be the the start of something great for wurm that can and will bring in new players and return old ones for a few months on end and i really do not want to see this turn into "just a hunting server where your skills transfer to and from with the map reset every 6 months" as whats the point in that? we have hunting servers and then deeding was enabled on those ruining those servers just make a 4k x 4k hunting server and slap better ai mobs on there and disallow deeding of any kind(besides a coastal respawn deed) and link that to normal freedom and leave jackal be a themed server

PHEW.
So it's been a busy week for me. I've been pouring over this since I made my last post - every free moment I've had. The end result is... TEST SERVERS IN AWS! (kinda)
I hit a pretty big snag on Java's RMI being very wonky with being inside a container. Basically for those who understand it - docker defaults to a bridged network mode. I was fine with this and I set it up to expose and bind ports correctly. Everything worked except for RMI! Turns out RMI gets reaaaaaally picky about what you bind it to and what it can and can't resolve for names. So I had to switch to host mode for networking and boom! It's odd that I never ran into this problem before considering the current test servers run in virtual machines in a bridged network... (or did I use NAT... I forget)
I have a bit more work now - like moving the config changes I made on the servers back into the code so they're set. I also will probably tear down and stand up these instances again this weekend to test all that out. Then there's the scripts for updating the container image and firing things back up, as well as shutting things down cleanly from the console. Once that's all done hopefully we can get people on there to help us test performance.
The tinkers among you may have noticed the Test AWS client option under Choose Client in the native launcher. This will take you to the test servers as they are in AWS. If you do use it, keep in mind it's a construction zone at the moment and I may do hard shutdowns without notice as I'm fiddling and fighting with things. Also I plan on taking a final snapshot of the test servers as they are currently in their VMs before this is over, so nothing done on the AWS test servers will stay.
More information to follow!

As much as I'm hyped, or want to be, @Sindusk's last remark hits it absolutely on the head. Perhaps there's a way to "acknowledge" an accounts "super status" on it's main world without compromising the landrush scenario entirely. Like giving 3x/5x/Nx skillgain until you reach your full potential from back on your main world? Shouldn't be too offputting for the new, casual players this may attract and perhaps even give them some incentive to not just participate in Jackal seasons.

So I got to thinking, there are a lot of minor, everyday annoyance in wurm. My current pet peeve is sudden withering (from very old sprouting to withered overnight), it's a bugger. I dread this happening to my trellises since I can't simply remake them!
The thing is, it's one of many tiny annoyances in wurm every day. Removing them would remove a lot of the challenge from the game, but giving an alternative fix might be something nice.
And this is where unicorn horn wands come in.
Take one unicorn horn (weight of 1.5), have a jewellery smith attach a gem (product QL capped by gem QL, weight = 2), then have a priest cast a spell on the wand (or use the appropriate spell rune on a wand) to give it an effect. ANYONE can use a wand and wands vanish once their QL drops below 0.
Unicorn Horn Wand + Wild Growth = Wand of Rejuvenation (use on a withered tree/bush/trellis to turn it back into a very old tree at the cost of 20 favour and 5 wand QL)
A couple more examples:
Unicorn Horn Wand + Heal = Wand of Curing (use on any diseased player or animal to remove disease at the cost of 30 favour and 10 wand QL)
Unicorn Horn Wand + Mend = Pottery Sealing Wand (use on any damaged pottery item to remove 20 damage at the cost of 20 favour and 5 wand QL)
Unicorn Horn Wand + Strongwall = Wand of Stable Footing (use on any unreinforced mine floor tile to reinforce it (default reinforced floor texture) at the cost of 30 favour and 20 wand QL)
Optional Extra: Give priests a damage reduction on wands [Damage =Base Damage*(1-(channeling/200))]
Edit: Changed borked formula

The server needs to attract a broad spectrum of the playerbase in order to be successful. "Solo" self directed players contribute to this as well in many ways not so obvious as grouping together to be a follower of others. Deeds too are beneficial as survival points in an environment too hostile and otherwise unenjoyable to all but the most extreme of the boisterous survivalists. Making the server restrictive in these respects then attracts a dwindling remnant of what otherwise could be a multiple mix of players. We can even see the Devs attempting to offer some benefit skill wise to players when they return to their home servers to counteract their thoughts that they are just wasting their time here for 6 months when within the main game they would have been able to progress their characters substantially in comparison.
Playing on this server reminds me of starting on one of the WU low/medium rate progress servers and even without some of the benefits that they would offer in terms of starting skills and tools. The main difference here being that Jackal is attached to the main game of WO and you must pay the same rate to play on it. I see it as having about as little benefit to my main character as playing WU, so I just play there with an alt to enjoy the different evolvement of the server, strange environment and creatures. Even then the 6 month wipe time of everything accomplished is worse than playing on a WU server because this is stated from the beginning whereas in WU the goal of most servers is to last for years as a number of them have already done. So this 6 month point will be in the back of everyone's mind from the start. A hard dilemma point for the Devs to deal with I would imagine, as to me it automatically diminishes the value of anything I accomplish there other than passing time in a for now novel environment.
=Ayes=

How cool would that be? If boats would serve as spawn point for the owner?
Would make living on a boat/house more viable and if that would drive the deeding people numbers down then just make it 1s/month to have the boat spawn point and this way will be almost as if they deeded.
People with deeds will pay the 1s for the boat spawn point too so more income for the devs.
Can have multiple boats but just one with the spawn point so that ppl dont just spread rowboats around then use them to tp across server with /suicide
Just block it in pvp and all will be good.

And that is bad? We are still using it to level our smithing skills and support beams and nails and ribbons we are still going to need to replace gear and you want more then ql 50 for sure in order to actually make it be worth while
As for moon metal veins they are rare and hard to mine adamantine veins have a difficulty of 60 which means at 50 mining and ql 50 pickaxe most ores that come out are still ###### so ya you can create 40 sickles but you wont be able to imp all 40 up to 50+ without finding multiple veins
As for normal veins you want your abundance of ores in them as people will find plenty of reasons to have them from brass lamps for that extra shinyness to silver for the weapons extra damage to gold and silver for electrum horse shoes and the list goes on
All that lowering quantity of ore veins and quantity in ore veins will do is more mining needed to get the metals you need to build what you need to build and only add to a mining grind that 99% of the wurm population hate(i myself love mining) you want people to focus on the new content not more on the old

You make some good points in your post Rhea. The solution to this is simple but maybe too "easy mode" in the minds of those who have the power to make it happen. The Freedom Beacons should all also function as teleports for anyone to return to the Freedom servers. Seems to me an important point that has been too casually overlooked in that many want to pop back over there to attend to the things you mentioned. As for me, Ayes has stayed at home and won't venture there due to those issues. Well, even beyond that I prefer to keep him on Freedom anyway to work on skills and enjoy puttering around the deed. I just sent an alt over there to mess about and don't care if he stays there the whole time or not. Always need to keep in mind that the Dev's will get ya some way if they can. *winks*
=Ayes=

To add to Retrograde's comment:
Sometimes the fixes require data to be modified as well, which requires a server to be restarted. For example, moving Jackal required all servers to be updated and made aware of the new IP address. It's possible this would've been refreshed, but it's safer to just bring the servers down and back up again.
As Retro said though, often a fix for one server or cluster is needed on all. Plus it makes me happy knowing all servers are running the latest code.

Patch Notes : Jackal Awaits!
Announcing the Jackal Server
Jackal is a new time limited server lasting six months that players can transfer to from every other server.
Accessing the Jackal server will require the player to be premium.
To initially access Jackal, rifts will spawn at server opening with specific scheduled start times listed below
Independence
6PM Fri UTC
Deliverance
10PM Fri UTC
Pristine
2AM Sat UTC
Chaos
6AM Sat UTC
Celebration
10AM Sat UTC
Xanadu
2PM Sat UTC
Exodus
6PM Sat UTC
Release
10PM Sat UTC
Serenity
2AM Sun UTC
Desertion
6AM Sun UTC
Affliction
10AM Sun UTC
Elevation
2PM Sun UTC
Once rift on that server is closed a lodestone will appear allowing transport to Jackal.
Jackal lodestones can be player crafted with rift materials, stone bricks and mortar and used as regular portals to Jackal after the initial rift is closed.
Jackal
Jackal is a hostile alien server with a vastly different aesthetic to the lands of Freedom.
Pine, orange and lemon tree types have been removed from Jackal.
Six new tree types have been added.
Jackal has the Epic hybrid skillgain system with 3x skill and 3x action speed.
Skill gained on Jackal will transfer to Freedom at a reduced rate
Disabled for the first few weeks to ensure when it is enabled it works smoothly
When enabled will apply to any skill gained from the beginning of jackal
A new Jackal journal tier has been added
Certain tasks within the standard journal tiers have been disabled from triggering while on Jackal.
Completing certain tasks on Jackal will reward the player with Jackal points, redeemable for new item skins on Freedom.
Item skins to come in the coming weeks and months
Jackal creatures
Added Isopod
Added Giant Crab
Added Weta – the new ridden creature.
Cannot wear gear
Can ride up 50 slope
Custom spawn table for jackal, not all creatures will spawn there
Corruption Clearing
Corruption can be cleared by creating freedom beacons and destroying jackal beacons.
Jackal beacons are defended by increasingly difficult groups of creatures, which will all need to be defeated before their hearts can be burned at the beacons in order to destroy them
Destroying jackal beacons will make it easier for freedom beacons to radiate their influence in the area
Following a god and becoming a priest will be available from freedom beacons
The prayer faith gain limit has been doubled from 5 to 10 per 24 hours uptime on jackal only.
Rift changes
New point calculation system
New point buy system
Defeating rift creatures and closing rifts will now reward players with Rift Points.
Rift points are now used to purchase specific items instead of RNG loot as before.
Accessible from lodestones and mailboxes when you have points to redeem
Updated Rift Creature AI
Each rift creature now has attacks and special mechanics depending on their type
New sounds for all Jackal creatures
Tweaked combat stats of Jackal creatures
Rifts now spawn in 4 waves that ramp up slower
Rift scouts
Small groups of Rift creatures will spawn across the server.
These creatures will provide a small challenge and reward the players with rift resource collection nodes and some rift points when defeated.
Changes to creature spawns
We will be trialing a new creature spawn table on two Freedom servers, Deliverance and Pristine. Players may see some new creatures previously only known on PvP servers.
Miscellaneous Changes
Change: Guard towers on elevation now take 2x damage, the warning message to kingdom has been lowered to 50 damage to account for this.
Change: Players on elevation can now lead 2 horses while walking only.
Epic Bugfix: Village reputation will now be checked before declaring war
PvP Bugfix: Tile distance limitations will no longer block transmutating tiles to dirt.
Elevation Bugfix: Epic players will now deal damage again while path of hate rage is active.
Client Changes
Bugfix: Fixed ‘FBO not bound’ launch crash
Bugfix; Fixed certain quickbind key names not showing
Bugfix: Fixed select bar selection updating when moving the camera instead of clicking
The post Patch Notes 30/AUG/19 Jackal Awaits! appeared first on Wurm Online.

You missed the part where EVERYONE is going there with no skills. You go there and you're as noob as everyone else. This is designed literally for people like you in mind, to create and experience you can feel comfortable in.

The primary reason to be a full-time jackal crafter is trade. To come stand at the stronghold and fight takes investment. Investment of time to level up your crafting skills on a server that will be deleted. Or investment of some silver into gear from people who did, so that you only need level up your fightskill to participate.
As a full-timer. I am banking on the latter to be significant enough to justify my investment of time. Especially as the hype drops off in later cycles of Jackal though, I really hope that these cosmetics have a high enough demand to keep people coming out to Jackal to buy my wares, or that if they aren't doing the job they adjust it by adding more rewards.
Regular rift points, the ability to import unbreedable animals, logs, and crops from jackal using the points we earn out here, other rewards etc.
This development is GREAT for people with new accounts they can't really compete with ancient accounts on freedom/epic. But keeping it viable is a matter of keeping most of the players in the game in a state where they will see visiting Jackal on occasion, and buying weapons, armor, food, bandages etc. while they are out there as a worthwhile endeavor.

Pretty stoked about this.
Based on the limited information you could draw the conclusion there is "no point" but it feels like there is a point that is yet to be announced.
Personally I'm hoping Jackal has its own journal system that resets every 6 months. Maybe something a bit more randomized from individual to individual like the old "life goals" system. I'm hoping the higher you go on that reward system, the cooler bonuses you win.
And I'm hoping that those bonuses take the form of rewards we can bring back to Wurm Online's main servers.
Would also love to see some cool uniques monsters etc. that you can get things importable to WO for killing.
That's my ideal scenario. As long as they get some kind of draw to get people to go there I'm going to be all over this though.
I don't think that is a bad suggestion. Personally if we were to shut down some servers I would say Epic and Xanadu. Epic because it's dead, and because releasing a PvP island for Jackal would entirely negate its relevance as a cluster.
Xanadu, while it may be the most populated server it has ridiculous travel times and lag due to its massive size. People living on Xanadu, especially central Xanadu, are very disconnected from the rest of the game. Shutting down Xanadu would cause a mass Exodus onto smaller servers which would make them feel far more populated.

With the quality lock now being a thing I can see the appeal for one. Unfortunately saroman is booked for the next six months of work which is due in two weeks, so his time turner is all stacked out. If he surfaces I may nag him about this.
Or just offer him a beer